Katy Milkman: On January 2nd of 2024, passengers on a Japan Airlines flight felt their plane shake intensely as it landed in Tokyo. Sparks started flying outside the airplane's window, and all of a sudden, the cabin was filling with smoke. Their plane had collided with another aircraft on the runway. When the smoking plane finally came to a stop, the Japan Airlines crew quickly and calmly enacted their emergency evacuation procedure. Incredibly, within just 90 seconds, they managed to get all 379 passengers off the jet, and it was just in time, too, because shortly afterwards, the aircraft burst into flames on the runway.
Japan Airlines managed what experts called a textbook evacuation under dire circumstances. But what made this possible? Arguably, the readiness was spurred by a previous tragedy. In August of 1985, a Japan Airlines flight to Osaka crashed due to a faulty repair from aircraft manufacturers. Nearly all 524 people on board tragically died. After this accident, the airline tightened up its culture, leaning heavily on safety drills and insisting on rigid operating procedures. In the process, they established a stellar safety record. Today, we're going to talk about culture. We'll take a look at the implications of how carefully people in different contexts follow social norms, rules, and procedures. And we'll see how strict and relaxed cultures affect the quality of our decisions. And how to find the sweet spot depending on your goals.
I'm Dr. Katy Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high-stakes choices and examine how they connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes.
Simon Rogan: It was a very tough time, I'd say, to work in those days. It was real high pressure, working very long hours for not much pay. Let's just say that it was a battle to get through the week. It was quite an intimidating, aggressive, and violent time to be a cook in those days.
Katy Milkman: This is Simon.
Simon Rogan: I am Simon Rogan, and I am the chef proprietor of the UMBEL Restaurant Group, which is a restaurant group that currently owns 10 restaurants around the world at the moment.
Katy Milkman: Simon came up through the ranks during the '80s and '90s in a time when kitchen culture could be pretty rough.
Simon Rogan: They were all tough kitchens. They demanded standards, and they achieved them by a real military-style organization, very strict, and you really had to be on your A-game, day in, day out. But I kind of enjoyed it as well because it makes you keep your head down, try not to make mistakes so you're not the focus of someone's rage. You really felt like you were making yourself better. You really felt it was worth it.
Katy Milkman: That military structure Simon's talking about, it's no exaggeration. Many professional kitchens really do follow a system of organization that's based on French military brigades. At the turn of the 20th century, George Auguste Escoffier created the kitchen brigade system. Escoffier was a famous French chef and former army cook who took inspiration from the clearly defined roles he'd encountered in the military when organizing professional kitchens. His system assigned cooks to over 20 well-delineated roles, and it ensured that every cook had a clear purpose in the kitchen so they could maximize their efficiency.
Simon Rogan: So it is always the head chef, or if it's a big kitchen, it might be an executive chef above them. So head chef, sous-chef, his deputy, and then you have the section chefs, the ones that are responsible for all the different elements of the menu, say the sauce for the meat, the poissonnier for the fish, entremetier for the vegetables, so on, so forth. They're called chef de partie. And then under them, you've got the commis chef, who are the young chefs, the training chefs.
Katy Milkman: Commis actually comes from the French word for "clerk." They're basically deputies to the chef de partie.
Simon Rogan: And then you go down to the plongeur, the pot wash, and the dishwashers. So that creates lots and lots of levels of authority, which obviously brings its own problems with bullying and doing things you shouldn't do to get results.
Katy Milkman: The brigade system can ensure that a diner's Wagyu beef is roasted to perfection or that their root vegetables are julienned evenly. In other words, the system makes for orderly kitchens that run like well-oiled machines, but the work environment that this authoritarian system produces can lead to burnout, resentment, and problems with staff retention.
Simon Rogan: In those days, that was seen as the way to achieve results by everyone knowing their job, executing it to the best of their ability, and bringing the whole product together within that system to create perfect dishes. It worked to a certain degree, but yet living and breathing throughout those days was slightly different than they are now.
One of the jobs I entered into, I was taken on as a pastry chef, and on my first day I was asked to go out the back door away from the service in this little alleyway on my own. I think it was raining. I think it was in the winter as well. Pretty grim, cold, and I was asked to sand down lots of oysters so that the oyster shell sat flat on the plate so it didn't wobble around. Well, that was a little bit odd being a pastry chef, but it's my first day. I want to please. I want to show people I'm approachable to do anything for the cause and to progress. So I did that, and I remember my hands being absolutely raw with the shell of the oyster and the sandpaper. So I finished a whole box of oysters, I think it's 48 or something like that. They sat perfectly on the plate. They were dead level.
Katy Milkman: Simon did the job the best he could, but then he was invited back into the kitchen.
Simon Rogan: And then was asked to juice a whole box of lemons, which obviously after sanding down a box of oysters wasn't going to be pleasant. My hands were stinging and red raw, and I went home that night absolutely throbbing and swollen hands, but that was my initiation. Is this guy up to the task? Will he do anything? How hungry is he to succeed in this kitchen? I laugh at it, but it didn't feel that funny at the time.
Katy Milkman: Simon says that questioning superiors or offering suggestions simply wasn't done.
Simon Rogan: You did as you're told. You did your job, and you did your job how you've been shown. You know the "Yes, chef" culture? That's exactly what it was. Now you get told something, you might not necessarily agree with that, but it's "Yes, chef, I have respect for you. You rank above me, and until I'm that position, then I keep my mouth shut, and I just do what I'm told."
Katy Milkman: It served Simon well to follow this approach. After starting as a commis chef at a Greek restaurant in southern England, Simon worked his way up to sous-chef and head chef roles in the best fine-dining restaurants in Paris and London, but Simon was itching to venture out on his own.
Simon Rogan: My last job, which was with an owner that didn't share my vision, I decided, right, that was it. I was going to find my own restaurant because I was only destined to achieve the results I wanted by being my own boss, making my own mistakes, creating my own pathway. So that took three years, which wasn't great.
Katy Milkman: Still, he was determined to make his own way. He started searching high and low for a restaurant space near his home in Southampton.
Simon Rogan: So Surrey, Hampshire, West Sussex, that part of southern England is where we were looking, but we actually ended up in the Lake District, 350 miles more north than what we'd intended, but it was a pure chance finding the restaurant and going to see it and falling in love with it.
Katy Milkman: Simon had fallen in love with an old building that used to house a blacksmith shop in the village of Cartmel in England's Lake District.
Simon Rogan: It's a very medieval village. There's no street lights. All the buildings are very old. It's a pretty dramatic backdrop having a medieval priory in the back of the garden. There was a river running by the garden, and I looked at the building, and it was just absolutely incredible, and I think I put in an offer on the way home.
Katy Milkman: Six months later, in 2002, Simon opened the doors of his first restaurant. He called it L'Enclume, which is French for "the anvil." A lot was riding on the success of this restaurant. Simon had no investors, and he and his wife had sold all their possessions to fund the renovations to L'Enclume's kitchen, an incredibly risky move. At first, Simon found himself relying on the management style he'd experienced as a sous-chef in order to achieve results.
Simon Rogan: Starting very early in the mornings, late at night, and I was running the kitchens pretty much like how I'd been a young chef.
Katy Milkman: L'Enclume was making a name for itself. Just three years after the restaurant opened, it was awarded its first Michelin star, one of the highest honors in the culinary world. But Simon was unhappy, and he was losing some staff.
Simon Rogan: And it sort of hit me, I don't want to be like that. I remember having a conversation around that 2007, 2008, with someone that I really respected, worked for a major food guide. She had a little word in my ear and said, "Look, I've seen the way you've grown. You need to concentrate on the good parts of you and the connection to your surroundings and the sustainable, organic way we do things. And if you do that, then you'll get what you want."
Katy Milkman: Simon realized he needed to reconsider some things about the way he ran his kitchen to be more creative. He opened his mind to the feedback and reflected on what changes to make, both to the kind of food he prepared and the way his team prepared it.
Simon Rogan: I think the very next day I made a proclamation to the guys in the kitchen, "Right, we are never using a foreign ingredient ever again," which they all looked at me as I was absolutely raving bonkers. But that's sort of what we did. Not immediately because there's things you have to gradually phase out before you can say you've ultimately achieved that goal. A lemon, for instance. There's no greater tool in a chef's toolbox than squeezing some lemon juice into something to heighten the flavor. So we had to find ways of duplicating that acidity before we can say, "Right, we stopped using lemons." So there was all these things that we needed to phase out, but one by one, we did that, and one by one doing that, I started to feel happier within myself.
Katy Milkman: The next change was with this team. Simon started to prioritize the kitchen staff who were supporting this change.
Simon Rogan: I was inspired, and I think the team followed. You get to this stage where you lead by example. There isn't anything I would expect them to do that I wouldn't do myself. You're only as good as the team around you. So you achieve standards by keeping a solid, motivated, loyal staff that are inspired by the head person. So I completely changed my mentality into keep hold of these people that we've put lots of time, effort, and money into because they are the future, and I will get quicker to my goals if they remain within my employment and are paid well, work less hours, and have that work-life balance to enjoy this amazing scenery in the Lake District, where we all enjoy swimming and climbing and cycling, walking. It makes things so much easier.
Katy Milkman: On top of staff earning higher wages and working fewer hours, they also had more of a say in the kitchen. It became a more relaxed and collaborative environment.
Simon Rogan: Quite simply, everyone can have an idea, from the most simple dish from a commis chef. Everyone can have an idea. Everyone can put their suggestions forward, and it'll be listened to. Before it would be like, "Don't be stupid. You're a commis. Go away." "Go and stand in the corner" sort of attitude. This is completely different. It's open.
In the early days, all the ideas, everything that went on a plate was in my head, and that was it. Being in my own head wasn't helping me whatsoever. I needed people to advise and people to help me with those ideas. So that team has got bigger over the years, so all the immediate management of the menu is seen by me, myself, my executive, my head chef, and maybe the sous-chef, and we all sit down together. That's the main body of it, but everyone has an idea. Everyone can submit their idea to our development team, and we'll work on it. And I say they're all hungry to succeed just like I was back in those days. Our staff retention started to get a lot better, and surprise, surprise, our standards seemed to rise, and we would start to get classified better.
Katy Milkman: L'Enclume won two more Michelin stars, one in 2013, making it a two-star establishment, and a third in 2022, which means the restaurant had earned the world's highest culinary honor, and all with this new, more relaxed, and less hierarchical approach. Simon's team has opened nine more restaurants since 2002, and he's proud that in each one he's brought his style of management and a very different kind of kitchen culture than the one he encountered in his youth.
Simon Rogan: From about 2017, 2018, we really put an emphasis on trying to create a blueprint for how a business can run and ensuring that the staff well-being is at its absolute utmost. We have a great time, we have a laugh, we have a joke. Yes, we get serious when it's game time, and the standards are very, very, very high, but they can cope with that. They know where the line is. When you're behind a certain ethos and ideal … we would walk over hot coals for each other. That's my favorite saying. And that shows in the kitchen because, yes, we have a laugh, a joke, it's relaxed. We get our prep done, service starts, boom. We're concentrated, focused, and we know there's a job to be done, and we know it's a job to be done to the absolute utmost standards. And it's easier to run a three-star restaurant because we have a long-standing, settled, motivated team that absolutely are in total love with what they're doing.
Katy Milkman: At L'Enclume, you won't find that tense, top-down kitchen culture from the '80s and '90s hiding behind a kitchen door. In fact …
Simon Rogan: We don't have a door. We wear our hearts on our sleeves, and the customers can see us. Basically, we're all very happy, and they comment on how happy we are because guests come into the kitchen, and they say, "Wow, this is calm." OK, if a mistake gets made, you note it, you log it, you go back at the end of the night, you talk about it, and then we rectify that mistake calmly and nicely. We like each other, and we are here to create something beautiful for you in a lovely environment.
Katy Milkman: Simon Rogan is a chef and restaurateur with 10 restaurants across the U.K. and Asia. He also runs a culinary program called the Academy by Simon Rogan, which trains young chefs and helps them get a foothold in the hospitality industry.
Simon's flagship restaurant, L'Enclume, has three Michelin stars and also holds a Michelin green star for its sustainable practices. You can find links in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
Simon's story of changing kitchen culture highlights how much a manager can affect the experience of their team at work and how both strict and relaxed kitchens can produce great food in different ways. Simon was very intentional about changing the culture in his kitchen, but there are huge differences in cultures around the globe, and typically those differences are not intentionally curated. What shapes how rule-abiding a culture is, and why does it matter?
My next guest is an expert on the way we make decisions in tight versus loose cultures, and why some cultures evolve to be tight while others evolve to be loose. Michele Gelfand is the John H. Scully Professor in Cross-Cultural Management and Organizational Behavior at Stanford University. She's also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the author of the terrific book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. Hi, Michele. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I'm really excited to have you here.
Michele Gelfand: Oh, it's great to be here, Katy.
Katy Milkman: Well, first I was hoping you could describe how you would define tight and loose cultures.
Michele Gelfand: So all cultures have social norms, these unwritten rules or behavior that sometimes get formalized in codes and laws. And in fact, we need social norms, as you know. Imagine a world where people are driving on either side of the street and not obeying stop signs, or they're stealing each other's food off of plates in restaurants or belching really loudly. There's a reason why we don't do these things. It's because we have rules that we abide by that help us coordinate and help us really predict each other's behavior. But really what we think about in terms of culture is that, while all cultures have rules, some cultures really strictly abide by those rules—we call them tight cultures—and other cultures have much more permissiveness. They have a wider range of behavior that's seen as permissible.
And our group has been studying the distinction of tight and loose across different levels of analysis. And we're trying to understand really what causes the evolution of tight and loose cultures, and what are its trade-offs for human groups. So that's the big picture of how we think about defining tight and loose in really kind of a broad way.
Katy Milkman: That was a great definition, and I love this work, and I'm excited to get into some of the details. Could you talk a little bit about some canonical examples that might be familiar to everyone of tight and loose cultures around the world?
Michele Gelfand: Yeah, sure. So you could think about one prototypical tight culture being Singapore. It's called "the Fine Country" because you can get a lot of fines for seemingly kind of minor infractions. Things like spitting or littering or even not flushing the toilet in public settings can land you a fine in Singapore, very top-down kind of tightness. And more of a loose culture might be New Zealand, where you might see people walking barefoot in banks or barefoot in lots of places actually, or people driving with open bottles of alcohol as long as they're in the speed limit.
And so really what you could think about in terms of tight and loose is when you are in a context where there's a lot of constraint or latitude, you can see this not just in modern era, you can go back, zoom back to Athens, ancient Athens versus Sparta. Or coming forward again, not even just the country level, think about the military versus Silicon Valley or even situations like this. Every situation we can code for tight and loose like funerals where there's sort of a very scripted way of how you behave, and there's a restriction of range of what you can do as compared to being in a public park.
Katy Milkman: That's so helpful. You really brought this to life, and I appreciate all those examples. As a scientist, I know you spend a lot of time thinking about how do you measure whether a culture is tighter or loose? What are the best ways to figure this out if somebody's in an organization or in a country and wondering is this a tight or a loose space? How would you measure that?
Michele Gelfand: In the original first study that we did on this, which was really kind of most macro-level at the society level, we simply asked people to report on the strength of norms in their local context, in Germany or in the U.S. or New Zealand. And we could see that people really agreed on their perceptions of how strict or permissive in general their countries were. We can also ask more fine-grained questions like how appropriate are certain behaviors, 15 behaviors across 15 situations? How appropriate is to argue in a bank or sleep in class, which as professors, it irritates us, of course.
Katy Milkman: Not appropriate.
Michele Gelfand: Not appropriate, students! And we can actually then see these measures converging when we get a little bit more nuanced in terms of those measures.
We've now recently been also looking at this at the domain-specific level, so we can zoom into, for example, pre-industrial societies and code for how strict or permissive the norms were in various domains like gender, socialization, sexuality, ethics, and we can then see do they kind of converge to a single factor? We can also even zoom into the brain. We really try to use multiple measures to look at how is culture embrained? And we could start looking at how much incongruity you detect in your environment and how much your brain is processing social norm violations.
Katy Milkman: That's really interesting. I was going to ask you next if you could tell us a little bit about some of your favorite studies showing how the tightness or a looseness of a culture predicts the decisions of the people who are inhabiting that culture. What are some of your favorite findings?
Michele Gelfand: Broadly speaking, we're interested in what causes the evolution of tightness—why it might be functional—or looseness, and then also with trade-offs that provides for humans, for us, in terms of when we make decisions, the kinds of choices we make. We can think about tight and loose as having an order-versus-openness trade-off.
For example, one of my favorite studies is by Chua and Roth and their colleagues, where they were looking at tightness and looseness and creativity. And particularly they were looking at these large crowdsourcing studies of creativity and who enters these contests and who wins. And these are contests where you kind of come up with creative ideas like come up with a new mall idea in Egypt or helps people in Australia to innovate on instant coffee, all sorts of crazy things that we actually crowdsource out ideas. And what they found was really super interesting, which is that, in loose cultures, people are much more likely to enter those contests, and they're more likely to win. And this is just one indication of the openness that goes along with looseness.
Katy Milkman: I have a question mark from that. Are you saying you're more likely if you come from a loose culture generally to be an entrant in any contest, not just one in your cultural setting, and then also to be the winner? OK, great. So I leave my loose culture, and I go to enter this competition that everybody's involved in internationally, and I have a better shot.
Michele Gelfand: Yeah, that's right. The idea is that loose cultures really provide context of great degree of openness, where people feel comfortable engaging in innovation and creativity and idea generation. Or openness also comes with tolerance. We find that in lots of studies that people are much more open-minded to living near different types of people, people from different races, religions, creeds. And so you could think about that we live … in loose cultures, we corner the market on openness, and tight cultures really struggle with openness. They struggle with stigma. They struggle with creativity. But on the flip side, tight cultures corner the market on order. They have far more discipline. People have more self-control. There's less debt. There's less obesity. There's less alcoholism. There's more self-regulation in tighter cultures. Even in city streets, there's more uniformity, there's more coordination, in terms of the shared reality that you might experience in any particular setting. And loose cultures really struggle with order. And so you can think about this as a trade-off of order and openness.
Katy Milkman: It's really interesting to point out those trade-offs and to think that, in some situations, we want both. The funeral example is a great one because it seems like it makes a lot of sense to have really tight culture in a funeral setting where people are grieving and need to have a predictable environment, but you also point out these contexts like an innovation limit that you would encounter if you have too tight of a culture. So you could imagine companies not wanting that. It's fascinating.
Michele Gelfand: I think what you just mentioned is really interesting because we're thinking a lot about this question of how do you maximize both order and openness in any social system? And I think about it psychologically as trying to maximize both empowerment that goes along with looseness and accountability that goes along with tightness. And in fact, we know what I call kind of the Goldilocks principle of tight-loose is that we know that groups have to lean tight or loose given certain ecological conditions, which we can get into. But actually, what we know is that the more they get extreme, the more dysfunctional tight and loose cultures are, whether they're extremely tight or extremely loose.
Extremely loose cultures that really prioritize empowerment and very little accountability have massive coordination problems, a lot of chaos. And on the flip side, you think about super tight cultures that are really maximizing accountability but really minimizing empowerment, and they're very repressive, and people want to escape both of these contexts. And in fact, we have data to suggest that there's a relationship between tight-loose and well-being. And actually, I think it opens up this really exciting possibility of how do you negotiate tight-loose when these things kind of happen at any social system?
I work with the Navy, for example, who clearly needs to veer tight. They have a lot of coordination needs. They have a lot of threat. But they want to insert some looseness into that system, into non-safety domains. Airlines, manufacturing, hospitals I work with also really want to tweak that balance between having a lot of accountability but some empowerment. And on the flip side, you can think about, here I am in the Silicon Valley, there's some places that are uber loose. They need to insert some structure, some accountability, to kind of retool that balance. And of course, there's going to be resistance from either direction. What we find … we try to help leaders think about and anticipate resistance. When you're trying to loosen a tight culture, boy, there's a lot of resistance. You have to really deal with and deal with it through having baby steps where you don't introduce huge change quickly.
On the flip side, when you're trying to tighten a loose organization or context, there's a lot of catastrophizing like, "Oh my gosh, we're going to lose all our autonomy," when in fact, no, we want to maintain that healthy balance but recalibrate a bit to have more of the balance between empowerment and accountability. So this is what more generally I call tight-loose ambidexterity. We invented social norms. We can harness the power of them when we need to change, and that's a lot of the work that we're doing now on at least in the organizational level.
Katy Milkman: By the way, I love that you sent me the quiz that allows people to figure out what their own degree of tightness and looseness is. I'd never taken it before, so I was very intrigued to discover that—as a lifelong rule follower whose husband always says, "You know it's OK to break the rules"—I was very loose. So anyway, I thought that was fascinating. Can you say a little bit more about individual tightness and looseness and what to make of all that?
Michele Gelfand: Sure. I'd like to first just mention that I don't like to call people tight or loose and equate that with nations. That's kind of an ecological fallacy. So we actually have a multilevel view of, at different levels of analysis, what variables are important to assess. And at the individual level we call this basically a tight or loose mindset. It's how much you're focused on following rules, like self-monitoring, managing impulses, liking a lot of structure. Those are all individual differences that all cohere. In looser cultures, people don't necessarily notice the rules as much. They're a little more impulsive, and they might be more tolerant of ambiguity. And these variables help people to fit in, to maintain the level of norm strength in their environments. You can't be in a culture without having the attributes that help you to reinforce them and sustain them.
It's more generally like what's your default? Are you an order muppet or a chaos muppet? As Dahlia Lithwick would say. Of course, we can change it up depending on the context, so we all can have our inner Ernie come out in certain situations, or our inner Bert in certain situations. But we all have a default based on our own experiences, our upbringing, and so forth. Maybe when you were answering this quiz, you were thinking about a certain context because you're crazy creative.
Katy Milkman: Oh, that's nice of you to say.
Michele Gelfand: So it might be that you are thinking about work context in this time, and this invites us to think about the quiz as what context you're thinking about when you're taking it that might affect your results.
I lean moderately loose on my own quiz. My husband, Todd, leans relatively tight, pretty tight, and he's a lawyer. He has a lot of accountability, a lot of what we talked about earlier. I have a lot of empowerment, some accountability, but we have different weights of those in our jobs. And we also try to be mindful of, "OK, why do we score differently on this?" Why might I have veered loose and him tight? And that gives us a little more empathy for our different mindsets, and it helps out with a lot of conflicts that we have. You can think about in the household when you partner up with someone, I always like to think we should give them the tight-loose mindset quiz like before they decide, because you're buying into … especially if you're really different, you're buying into potential conflicts related to finances, parenting. Our most famous conflict is over the dishwasher. I mean, he is really disturbed, deeply disturbed of how I load the dishwasher because he thinks it's a mess, and he thinks it's just improper and just actually now redoes the dishwasher. He even reloads it.
Katy Milkman: That's amazing.
Michele Gelfand: But what I find fun actually when it comes to the quiz is that once you know your own preference, you could start to negotiate like any negotiation. We can think about what domains in our household need to be tight and what can be loose, and that might change over time. And I think that's a way of being ambidextrous is thinking about how to negotiate these things. And it starts with a quiz because you could first of all find out about yourself. Culture starts with the self.
Katy Milkman: Michele, I love the quiz, and we'll definitely put a link to that in the show notes so that people can find it. I love that as a place to wrap up, and I so appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. Michele, thank you for all of this insight and wisdom. It's been a pleasure.
Michele Gelfand: Oh, thank you so much, Katy.
Katy Milkman: Michele Gelfand is the John H. Scully Professor in Cross-Cultural Management and Organizational Behavior at Stanford University. She's also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World, which I highly recommend. You can find links to her book, her research, and her online quiz in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
For help decoding complex financial concepts and the specific decisions we make in our financial lives, including how the phenomena we explore on Choiceology might impact your portfolio, check out our sister podcast, Financial Decoder. You can find it at schwab.com/financialdecoder or wherever you get your podcasts.
Even though culture is invisible, it's incredibly important and can meaningfully shape our decisions. For example, Michele's work during the pandemic showed that countries with tight cultures had far lower death rates from COVID-19 by late 2020 than countries with loose cultures. But on the flip side, tight cultures can stifle innovation. Because there are upsides and downsides to both tight and loose cultures, the ideal is to be aware of the culture you're creating and to aim for the kind of ambidextrousness that Michele tries to inculcate in her home life. When safety and rule following are critical because of a threat, like after the Japanese Airlines crash or during a global pandemic, tightening up and following rules will save lives. But when you're not facing threats and are trying to excel in a creative endeavor, loosening up could bring you a Michelin star or startup success in Silicon Valley. The key is to be conscious of the culture you're creating and to be purposeful with where and when you set strict versus permissive norms.
You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, on Substack. Next time, you'll hear about a popular psychological reality TV show and how appearances can be misleading. I'm Dr. Katy Milkman. Talk to you soon.
SPEAKER 4: For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/podcast.
